Metro Pulse/Midpoint

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Gifts in a season of mystery

by Stephanie Piper

She was the daughter we never had, at least for a while. The long-time sweetheart of our oldest son, she helped us trim countless trees and eat countless turkeys. She knew where the dishes went and how to run the washer and what it meant when the pipes made that funny noise. She saw us at our best and at our worst, and never failed to make us laugh. Once I watched from an upstairs window as she ran up our front walk, swinging shopping bags and singing softly. She looked like someone coming home.

When she and our son parted ways, we were bereft. Somehow, they stayed friends, and so she remained in our lives. There were cards and notes and an occasional glimpse of her on a trip to New York. We missed her, especially at the holidays.

She called a week before Christmas. Her voice was ragged. Her mother was dying in a hospital in Pennsylvania. I kept her on the phone, spinning out stories of miraculous recoveries and the power of prayer. I tried to hold her close over the long distance line, to find the words that would make her safe, make it better, make it bearable.

In the days that followed, it was as though she had never left us. The family converged by phone and email, comparing notes and medical bulletins. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was over. Her mother was gone.

Or so we thought. The day after her death, there was another call. Her mother was an organ donor. Against all odds, her kidney went to someone her daughter knew. He was a young man in his twenties, kept alive only by dialysis. The kidney was a perfect match. Five days after the transplant, he walked out of the hospital, healthy and whole.

I remembered a holiday her mother once spent with us. We told our stories over cups of tea, as women together eventually do. Hers was a hard one, marked by struggle. It had left her with an abiding love for the small and the helpless. She told me about working at a home for babies with AIDS, and about a Native American woman she had met there. The woman said that her people believed every life was a perfect circle, whether it lasted for days or for decades. No matter how sudden the end might seem, the circle was unbroken.

Beneath its obvious dazzle, Christmas is a season of mystery. In the winter darkness, we are asked to consider light. Plagued with anxiety and doubt, we are told not to fear. Overworked and overdrawn, we are asked to produce gifts.

The mother of our borrowed daughter brought the gifts this year. She shared her girl with us again. She taught us that because nothing belongs to us forever, everything does. She showed us how love, when it is real, always multiplies and never divides. he finished the task we're all trying to get right, day after weary day. From the sharp edges of grief and loss, she made a circle.